Wednesday, June 26, 2013

I’m showing this quick and easy white bean
and herb salad for several reasons, not the least of which is to give you a
perfectly delicious way to use up the end of that already used once bunch of
parsley or cilantro.

You told yourself you were going to add them to your next
stock, forgetting you don’t make stock, and the sheared remains end up in the
back of the vegetable crisper where they die a slow, slimy death. Well, this
may be the answer.

Both cilantro and Italian parsley have tender stems that
pretty much taste exactly like the leaves. By slicing the last half of the
bunch thinly, across the stems, you have a perfect addition to any simple, cold
bean salad. Besides herb stem recover and utilization, this recipe deserves to
be in the rotation for two other very good reasons. It only takes like five
minutes to makes, and goes beautifully with any and all of the traditional
grilled or barbecued summer meats.

This video also reminds me that you wannabe food snobs need
to stop making fun of people that don’t like cilantro. For about 10% of the
population, due to certain receptors on the tongue, cilantro tastes nasty,
which explains why so many people detest the stuff. The good news is that
parsley works even better, so everybody wins.

On a spice note, I used Aleppo pepper here instead of
cayenne or pepper flakes, and I hope you do the same. I only discovered this
pepper recently, and just love it. It’s hot, but not too hot, and has a bright,
fruity flavor I think you’ll really enjoy. Please note: In the video I said it
was my new favorite pepper, but I only did that to make cayenne jealous. I hope
you give this a try soon. Enjoy!

26 comments:

I'll be trying this next time I am asked to bring a side dish for a BBQ or get-together! Also definitely going to look for Aleppo pepper next time I'm at the store. Just as a heads up, it looks like you missed the mustard in the ingredient list on the blog post.

Dear Chef John! Thanks for your blog comment regarding cilantro! Taste-wise it's a genetic thing; and I owe a large portion of my Hispanic recipe repertoire to this herb. Somewhere shortly after the turn of this century I stopped going to restaurants in the U.S. that seemed to suddenly discover cilantro and chopped it onto EVERYTHING!... tastes just like soap to me.

But anyway, friends and fam seem to enjoy my Hispanic recipes and I think the delicacy of the herb lends itself well to being served as a condiment on the side for those who like it.

Cayenne, jealous? Never!...I just bought some cilantro and I too have the same problem with the leftovers. Sometimes I will make two cilantro pistou with leftovers so that I will have it in the summer with tomatoes from the garden as cilantro grows best in the my winter garden.

I could be wrong but I think the reason California has Champagne is because when the agreement that only Champagne would come from the correct region in France was signed the United States was in the middle of Prohibition, and there was no legal alcohol production. Just something I remebered from a wine class I took from a guy who's name I forget.

Hi Chef John! Today I made your white bean salad but I doubled it...then on a whim I poured it into my food processor and made the most delicious white bean dip! If I have any leftovers, it'll be great in wraps all week. Thanks and I love your spicy wit...I look forward to your sense of humor as much as I do the recipes.

Made this bean salad before and it was so easy and delish, want to do again. Couldn't find on recipe list! Versus scrolling down blogs of salads, think better to search a topic, like Salads, then list each to choose from. I had to Google to find thinking not yours, but there it was in Google search.

Here's some bonus info for parsley lovers...if you have parsley in your garden (and you should!), allow it to winter over. Put on your coat, trot out to the garden, brush the snow aside and grab a handful of glorious parsley. It's not quite as perky as the summertime version, but it holds up to the cold quite nicely.